This was certainly something. I expected crazy and I got crazy. Hunger is a character study of an individual, it's not your typical story, there's little plot or character development to be found but instead you find yourself as a reader utterly entrenched in the head of a lunatic.

What i found most surprising about Hunger was just how ahead of it's time it was in certain aspects. You've got an unreliable narrator, an almost magical realism component to parts of the story and a willingness to completely forgo many commonplace components required In a popular story; in short there are literary techniques being used that were incredibly rare for the time. 
Not only that but the feel of this story is just so unique, the closest thing I can compare it to is section's from "Notes from the underground" by Dostoevsky. But this story is completely manic, it's bipolar in style and has an unsettling up and down, up and down rhythm.

I can't rank this any higher than a 4 because I do think there are flaws to it, Hamsun doesn't go as deep into the inner workings of the character as I would have liked, and the story has a repetitiveness to it, but again this is meant as an artistic experience more so than a typical story.

Despite Knut Hamsun being a bit of a dick head, he's undoubtedly inspired authors and genres that im a fan of in the modern era, so it was super interesting to read one of the progenitors of it all.